If you’ve ever created a snowflake by folding, cutting and unfolding a piece of paper, you’ve practiced the art of kirigami. Like origami, kirigami has inspired innovations far beyond the elementary school classroom, with applications ranging from deployable structures for spacecraft to semiconductors.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Engineering have employed kirigami strategies to generate complex shapes that mimic tissue forms found in the human body. Their work has implications for tissue engineering and wound healing.
The paper, “A 4D Bio-Kirigami Strategy for Engineering Complex Tissue Curvatures,” was published in Cell Biomaterials . The authors included Kaelyn L. Gasvoda, Aixiang Ding, Zhangli Peng, Alexandria Sterenberg, Oju Jeon and Eben Alsberg.
In recent years, researchers have been exploring the potential of kirigami in wearable technology, optics and a growing number of other areas. Its techniques give flat, stiff materials new stretchability and flexibility characteristics. Materials can also be reshaped without their composition having to be changed.
But kirigami’s potential has not been readily explored in tissue engineering or with soft, gel‑like materials that can hold living cells, said Kaelyn L. Gasvoda, a 2024 UIC graduate. She earned her PhD in biomedical engineering and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Mayo Clinic.
In the laboratory of UIC professor Eben Alsberg, which focuses on developing innovative strategies and technologies to repair and regenerate damaged or diseased tissues in the human body, Gasvoda, Aixiang Ding and other members of the research team began fabricating constructs engineered to change their shapes over time. Through programmed shape transformations, these constructs can develop into tissue-like structures with precisely defined geometries without requiring additional manipulation by the researchers.
“That was exciting, but we wanted to push further — to create more complex shapes with controlled self‑patterning and bending. Our goal was to design structures where we could precisely guide how they form and transform,” Gasvoda said.
“Complex geometries are important in tissue engineering because human tissues have intricate, three-dimensional shapes that are closely linked to their functions,” said Ding, a research associate professor. The team focuses on engineering tissues with complex architectures, including cartilage, bone, tracheal and vascular tissues, with the goal of recreating their native structures and functions.
“Conventional tissue engineering approaches have struggled to reproduce some of these structures, particularly those with complex curvatures and other intricate features,” Gasvoda said. “We began exploring a different way to program constructs to change their shapes over time, allowing us to create tissue geometries that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.”
The researchers aimed to design structures with a rigid outer framework that would maintain its shape without expanding in the culture medium, Ding said. In contrast, the inner regions needed to absorb the medium and expand while remaining cytocompatible to support long-term cell survival, growth, and differentiation, he said.
To achieve this, the team developed a hydrogel-based platform using derivatives of gelatin and alginate, a natural polymer derived from seaweed. Using photolithography, they used patterned light to create regions with different crosslinking densities in the materials, enabling precise control over how different parts of the constructs expand and deform over time.
Having demonstrated the platform’s ability to generate complex geometries in concert with new tissue formation, the next step would be to evaluate its performance in animal models, with the long-term goal of translating the technology toward clinical applications.
“We see significant potential for this technology to engineer tissues with complex three-dimensional architectures, precisely while enabling the spatial organization of multiple cell types to support their distinct functions,” Ding said.
“Our research demonstrates that kirigami-patterned, cytocompatible hydrogels can be engineered to autonomously bend, fold, and transform into complex three-dimensional shapes,” Gasvoda said.
This approach opens new possibilities for engineering tissues that more closely replicate the intricate architectures of native tissues, helping address a longstanding challenge in tissue engineering.
Written by: Christine des Garennes, UIC College of Engineering
Cell Biomaterials
A 4D bio-Kirigami strategy for engineering complex tissue curvatures
14-Oct-2026